Race & IQ Differences:
An Interview with Arthur Jensen, Part 2

5,441 words / 41:23

Part 2 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

Transcript by Hyacinth Bouquet. The following is a transcript of the second part of Marian Van Court and Arthur Jensen’s conversation, which can be heard here, or using the player below.

Topics include:

IQ and common sense

Social intelligence as g + extraversion, or g + social experience

Are Jews overrepresented among his opponents and underrepresented among his critics?

Male versus female support for the idea of hereditary racial intelligence differences

The correlation between IQ and education and the dumbing down of college education

Arthur Jensen: Okay, let’s take the third thing now. You say, “It certainly appears to be the case that some people with high IQs don’t have much common sense, and some people with average IQs have a good deal of common sense. Do you agree that this is true? If so, how do you fit this into your conceptual scheme? Do you explain it solely as the influence of personality factors, or do you postulate the existence of another kind of mental ability not currently measured by IQ?”

Well, that’s a very big and difficult question. It’s certainly true that persons with high IQs sometimes do things that we think show poor judgment, or a lack of common sense. So do people with average and low IQs, and I think a lot of this has a kind of anecdotal status. What someone should do — and I’m not sure that it’s been done, I’ve never seen it done in my wide reading of the literature — is to set up a series of questions that would be criteria of common sense and make a kind of test out of this. See whether there is a kind of common factor that you could call common sense — that is, whether there’s a general factor among types of behaviors you would say represented common sense. It seems very likely to me that there wouldn’t be.

Marian Van Court: That there would not be?

AJ: That there would not. What we call common sense is something that’s very situation specific, and it’s very dependent on one’s experience in those kinds of situation.

For example, I can think of a person of rather average intelligence who was once a used car salesman. He has a lot of what you would call savvy, and common sense, and street smarts about cars. Now, whenever he buys a car, he is less apt to be taken in, especially if he’s buying a used car, than a person would be who has had no experience with used car dealers. You could get some person to go in and really be taken by a used car dealer. You’d say, “That guy just has no common sense to believe that this car had new tires, when they were only tires that had been painted with a rubberized paint to make them look new, and all of this.”

In other words, you’d say this fellow was naive. He might be a Nobel Prize winner in physics. You’d say, “What a naïve person; he has no common sense.” It’s just because he’s not experienced in that particular realm. So I think this has a lot to do with one’s life experiences. I think it has to do, in part, with personality. I think that you’ll find, for example, that extroverts probably have more common sense than introverts, partly because they have more interaction with the social world, and therefore more experience of it.

It also has to do with interests. A person has just so many waking hours, and if your interests go largely to things that do not involve action in the world, the affairs of the world, so to speak — say, an Immanuel Kant who’s sitting around thinking about the deepest questions in philosophy of his time, spending hours a day doing that – [you] can’t be learning a great deal about some of the practical things in the world that a merchant, let’s say, is dealing with — dealing with people and with what we regard as common-sense situations.

For example, I seem to have much less common sense in a store than my wife has. She’ll be shocked that I’m willing to take something and put it in the shopping basket. She says, “Just look at the price on that! That’s way out of line, compared to what you can get at other stores.” Well, I don’t know.

So I think common sense is a host of all kinds of situation-specific experiences, plus what a person values — what a person thinks represents his own idea of being intelligent.

It doesn’t bother an Einstein, let’s say, to be considered naïve about certain financial matters, and so forth. He doesn’t mind not being smart in that, just as some people don’t mind not being good at sports. Their particular self-identity and self-image is tied up with a particular sphere of action.

MVC: Also, someone like Einstein would be less likely to conceal the stupid or naïve things that he might do or say, and he would just think that if he did something which seemed really off the wall, he might think, “It’s interesting that I’ve done something that’s so stupid.” Because he already knows that he’s brilliant. You see what I mean? Whereas these extroverted people, who are always in social interactions, when they make a blunder, they can conceal it more readily.

AJ: Right, yes. That may be a part of it, too. There’s an interesting anecdote about Einstein buying an elevator for his one-story house. An elevator salesman came to him and sold him an elevator, and he didn’t really want it. His daughter had to cancel the order. She said, “Why on earth did you ever buy an elevator for a one-story house?” He said, “The fellow was so nice, and he gave such a convincing sales talk, that I just couldn’t turn him down.” You say: Look at the guy; he’s got no common sense! He had the greatest scientific mind since Newton, but the average person would never get into that kind of a fix.

MVC: Yes, that’s a perfect example.

AJ: So I don’t think that this represents any kind of really measurable ability, independent of some personality factor, situation-specific types of experience, and interests and values. That’s about all I would have to say about that.

I think that if someone made up an inventory of instances of behaving in a judicious and sensible way in many different situations, you would find that scores on that kind of an inventory would be loaded on the same “G” factor that is loaded in intelligence tests. It would be positively loaded.

For example, in the armed forces they take in persons with test scores lower than the normal cutoff, and see what can be done with these very low-scoring persons. There were persons below the 30th percentile in intelligence. They let them in on an experimental basis — Project 100,000, that was carried out in the armed forces some years ago. They found that these people had much greater difficulty just managing their personal lives. They got into many more kinds of personal difficulties — financial, marital, legal, all kinds of things where they made poor judgements. They actually had less common sense, you might say. They were a liability, in the sense that the Navy had to manage their lives.

MVC: Yes, and it’s like you expect that they are not going to have much common sense, and somehow people expect that people with really high IQs will; so when they don’t, a big deal is made out of it.

AJ: The exceptions stand out.

MVC: It’s interesting, because when I wrote this question, I thought to myself that there is something else, such as common sense, and I thought that you would probably say that you didn’t think there was. I thought, “I wonder what he’s going to say?” All that you’ve just said has changed my mind.

AJ: There’s a whole book out now called Practical Intelligence, which is about this whole issue. It’s written almost entirely by people who believe that there is some other kind of intelligence besides the psychometric “G” that we talk about which runs through all intelligence tests. But I’m fairly convinced that if you made up any test of practical intelligence, it would be highly “G” loaded, and some of the evidence in this book shows that’s the case. You’re really talking about the same general factor, but it could be modified in terms of situational experience.

MVC: The next question was about social intelligence.

AJ: I would say very much the same kind of thing about that. I think social intelligence is probably “G” plus extroversion, mainly, and social experience. People differ in the amount of social experience they have. This is partly a function of their intellectual interest and of their personality — extroverts have more social experience than others — and also by the kinds of work they do, and the kinds of interests they have.

I believe that my own social intelligence, for example, increased between adolescence and middle age. I think there was a rather steady increase, because I was forced to have more interactions with people in a wider variety of situations, and so on. If you care about doing things right, then you learn the things that you have to know; and so I think I developed somewhat greater social intelligence, but still nothing to brag about. I do know people who I think are smarter than I am who have worse social intelligence. Probably people who haven’t valued it at all.

MVC: My own casual observation of this would be that women are more oriented towards people. I would say that, for example, when thinking about my mother and my father. My father is a lot smarter than my mother is, but she still has to explain very, very fundamental things to him, about what to say and what not to say.

AJ: I know three really famous scientists — I won’t mention their names — and I know their wives. In every case, both the husband and wife agree that the wife has a lot more social intelligence. They seem to be able to read other people better. They know who the people are who are sincere admirers and who are the sycophants, things like that.

I know my own wife, for example, is better at dealing with people when you have to get something out of these people; when you want favors done by them: sales people, or when you’re returning something that you really didn’t want to buy, and things like that, and getting a nice response from them. My wife is better at that than I am. She is much less blunt and could turn on the charm in a way that is totally alien to my nature.

MVC: [Laughs]

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AJ: I know men who are like that, too, and I think that to be successful in certain fields one has to have this kind of social skill. I wouldn’t call it intelligence, I would call it a skill; and I think it’s a developed skill that comes from having values that lie in that realm, and also an extroverted personality.

MVC: But nobody has managed to do anything with this. I remember reading about this a long time ago. Nobody has managed to create this.

AJ: No, I haven’t seen any real tests of social or anything like that. I think that employers would try to pick that up in interviews. I think that’s one of the things that they may look for in the interview situation, simply because there are no really good measures of it. Again, I think it’s an acquired kind of skill, very much like what we call practical or common-sense intelligence in that way.

There is not much more I can say about that. There is literature on this, and it’s a literature that I haven’t looked into very recently, so I don’t know what the latest views on it really are. I haven’t seen anything dramatic come out on this in the last few years. I’m just aware that there are articles in the journals that come out now and then about having social intelligence, but they never seem to come to any very strong conclusions.

Now, the next question, five: “Do you think Jews are overrepresented among your critics and under-represented among your supporters; if so, why?” I think this is almost impossible to answer in any way that isn’t so highly subjective that the answer is practically worthless. For one thing, you have to realize that many of the people in the behavioral sciences are Jewish; that Jews are overrepresented, you might say, in the behavioral sciences, and in the academic world in general. Of course, most of my critics are in that category. So you would find quite a few critics who are Jewish. Then, I also know quite a few people who assume a position similar to mine who are Jewish, and so I don’t really know what to make of that.

There’s one other factor, however: Jews, on the whole, tend to be politically liberal, and persons of that persuasion tend to take a strongly environmentalist position about human differences of all kinds.

The other thing that can be noted is that groups that have been rather conspicuously successful don’t like to have it pointed out that this success may be in any way inherent in anything about their nature — that it’s a result of their culture, their values, their effort. This is even true of Asians now. Oprah Winfrey had a show where she had a number of Asians on and where they were discussing the Asian superiority in scholastic performance, and all of that. They all insisted that it was not because they were really different, but because they valued achievement more highly than other groups. There may be some truth in that, in part.

MVC: Also, it would be kind of gauche to say, “The reason I’m so successful is because I was born brilliant.” You couldn’t really say that.

AJ: Right. On a radio talk show here in the United States, the late Lord Snow — formerly Sir T. P. Snow, the famous British author — was asked why there were so many Jewish Nobel Prize winners, considering what a small minority in the world’s population they are, yet they’re such a large proportion of Nobel Prize winners. He said he thought that there was a genetic basis for this; and he told me that he’s never, in his whole career, received so much vituperative mail as he did as a result of that statement. He was denounced in the Jewish press very strongly.

MVC: Do you think maybe they think that if they insist that it’s environmental, this vitiates envy and resentment?

AJ: Envy and resentment, yes. I think it’s a defense mechanism, in a sense, to disclaim that the basis of this is anything other than purely a matter of their personal values, and so on. I think that’s all I can say about that. That makes sense.

It’s interesting, however, that there is probably a large proportion of Jews in this group that was surveyed by Rothman, and I can’t remember the names of those two authors who did the article in The Public Interest. You undoubtedly have a reprint of that article.

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MVC: No, I don’t have a reprint of the article. I have a letter that I tore out of Time magazine in which you quoted them. I don’t know what the name is.

AJ: The majority opinion in every case, on every question that they asked in their questionnaire about test bias, heritability of intelligence, genetic factors, race differences, and so on was in agreement with my position. And yet, probably a fairly large portion of the sample that was canvassed there are Jewish, because they are behavioral scientists. A lot of these are what are called closet Jensenists, and they’re willing to come out of the closet in an anonymous questionnaire.

Okay, [next question]: “Have you noticed any tendency for women to be more or less likely to agree with you than men are?”

I haven’t the faintest idea. I haven’t noticed any real difference, one way or the other. In general, I think I have noticed somewhat more tough-minded opinions — not knowledge necessarily, but opinions in this area, expressed by men — particularly, say, businessmen who have employed persons of different racial groups and have formed certain opinions about them and about their reliability and work capacity from their casual observations and their own experiences.

I don’t know any women who’ve had those kinds of experiences. Two women schoolteachers who I’ve talked to, and who taught in predominantly minority schools, have had rather strong opinions about some of these things, although these opinions are often expressed on the environmentalist side. They seem to have strong opinions about the existence of the observed differences, but they may still maintain purely environmentalist explanations of them. They’ll give you the whole litany of popular environmental explanations for why the children in the suburban schools they once taught in are doing so much better, maybe three or four grade levels above the minority school that they’ve been transferred to, for example. I’ve talked to a number of teachers with those experiences.

Those are very unsystematic observations. One could, of course, research something like this by setting up questionnaires and giving it to random samples of men and women, or men and women teachers, who’ve had comparable experiences. But it doesn’t seem to me to be an important enough issue to warrant any real research effort.

MVC: Yes, it’s really not very important, actually. It was mostly out of curiosity on my part, because it seemed to me that women tend to be a little bit more conformist and they also maybe tend to be a little bit more liberal.

AJ: Liberal, and a bit more sentimental about some of these things. It’s interesting that my own parents are kind of an example of this. Neither one of them had any knowledge about these issues, that is any technical or scientific knowledge about them. But my father seemed to be able to go along with my arguments. My mother never really did, except that she, in a sense, never forgave me for the Harvard Review article. She thought that she [had] failed somewhere, that I could have written such an article.

MVC: Are your parents alive?

AJ: No, neither one is, but they were both alive at that time, and they both read these things, and they read what was in the popular press. My mother had a very sentimental attitude about these things and thought it was all a matter of education and time. That these people who were oppressed, victimized by racism and all of that, simply needed time to catch up.

It’s a very popular kind of notion. Some of my good neighbors here have the same very common belief.

MVC: I think there are a lot of things, as in for example the liberal’s idea about how to run the economy, or about the racial question, where if you don’t study them and you don’t have real experience, you can easily have one of these views. I mean, you can be a reasonable, intelligent, nice, well-meaning person and have one of these views, and it’s perfectly understandable.

AJ: Right, yes. I’ve run into that frequently, you know, and many of these people don’t have the kind of background that’s necessary for understanding the arguments at a technical level, and that’s where the arguments really are. The issue, when you really get into it, is that you have to get down to very technical things.

MVC: I think two of the most compelling points would be the issue of test bias: the way you identify items if they’re going to be biased, and the fact that you don’t find these things. There’s that; and then there’s the fact that all these environmental things have been tried and they can’t find anything.

[There are things that are telling] even for a person who doesn’t know anything at all about the technical aspects of the argument. Just in the last 20 years, while I was flipping around the TV around, and I was watching some sort of track meet, and every single one of the people there running around the track meet — every single one — was black. It was some kind of a relay race, short distance.

AJ: Of course, one could argue that these physical differences that make for excellence in athletic skills can’t really be directly transferred over, unless you talk about cognitive abilities. You could say: ”We know there are physical differences between races, and certain physical differences may give one race a statistical advantage in, say, running or jumping or swimming, or whatever, but there is no way to get to that cognitive ability.

MVC: Right. I was just going to list some general observations that the average person might have which show that racial differences do exist.

AJ: Oh, yes. These people certainly acknowledge those differences, and of course another argument that they give — and I think there’s some validity to it, too — is that when they see people excelling in these things, more children try for them. There’s certainly more black boys who want to be basketball players than who want to be concert violinists. At least in Europe, there are many Jewish boys whose parents want them to be concert violinists. Many of them have a violin thrust into their hands at a very early age.

MVC: Another thing would be, for example, if you look at the different countries in Africa since independence. I read an interesting book recently about the history of various countries from the time of independence up to the present, and almost every single chapter started off [saying that] things looked real rosy. There was a big celebration for their independence and blah blah blah blah, and then, after a while, they started to have trouble. Then, within about five years, things were really getting to be in bad shape. In ten or 15 years, the gross national product or the per capita income plummets. Of course, they always say it’s because the colonial powers didn’t give the Africans enough education, or they didn’t do this, or they didn’t do that. There’s so many implausible things.

AJ: You notice that this hasn’t happened in other colonies where the European nations have withdrawn. It didn’t happen in Singapore when the British got out. It hasn’t happened in many other parts of the world. It hasn’t happened in India. India has become a self-sufficient nation. It’s developed a fairly high state of technology in certain areas now, and of course has the largest brain drain of any country in the world. A lot of them are enticed to Africa in order to run the technology there, and of course many of them come here to Canada, and other places, where they can receive higher pay and better facilities for their line of work.

MVC: One other example I was going to say — I’m talking too much, maybe, but I was just going to say that there’s this dispute about whether there are not enough blacks who are coaches in the National Football League. There are a lot of black players, but there are not very many black coaches. Maybe there was just one, I can’t remember exactly, and there are not very many black quarterbacks. When the average person sees what’s happened in Africa, the business about what’s going on in football, and the fact that in the schools they keep making one excuse after another. All I’m saying is that the parsimonious explanation is that there’s a difference in intelligence, whereas if you don’t . . .

AJ: The difference is “G.” I’ve given up using the word intelligence, but I don’t know that we have to get into that, because it means too many things to too many people.

MVC: Can you just say “G”?

AJ: [Intelligence] really encompasses a number of things in common usage, so I talk about the psychometric “G,” and I think that’s where the difference really is. There are other abilities, independent of “G,” in which the groups don’t differ, or even differ in the opposite direction, and they’re cognitive abilities. But the “G” is so predominant, and so important for any kind of intellectual activity, that it shows up in just about everything people do.

All of these things that you’ve mentioned certainly add to the plausibility of a sort of basic biological evolutionary explanation. They certainly don’t detract from the plausibility of this. They can’t prove it, but they add up to a very strong plausibility, and I accept that. The majority of people who were questioned do seem to agree; at least when they can answer anonymously.

MVC: It would be so interesting to see, if people had to sign their names, if you could do a study, and where you have two large samples: one where they’re supposed to sign their names, and one where they’re not, and see what kind of difference you get.

AJ: I agree. Let’s take up number seven, okay?

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MVC: Okay.

AJ: [Question] “Evidently, people have noticed the association between education and success, and have concluded that the act of attending classes, reading books, taking exams, and especially receiving diplomas makes people successful. Everyone is encouraged to go to college. Is this thinking confused? How much good is a college education in and of itself?”

Every time I see any kind of question like the questions you’ve sent me here, I think of what kind of research would have to be done to answer them. I guess the kind of research one would have to do here is to have some criterion of success or something, and then see how much that’s predicted by amount of education, independently of intelligence, and amount of intelligence, independently of education. That sort of thing has been done. If you use occupational status as a criterion, for example, it turns out that both education and IQ make independent contributions to a person’s occupational status. That can be easily misinterpreted, because persons of, say, very low IQ never get into certain occupations; and there’s a high correlation between amount of education and IQ. The correlation has gotten lower in each succeeding decade, because more and more people are required to go to school, and do go to school. There’s still a fairly high correlation, something like 0.6 or 0.7, between amount of education and IQ. The vast number of school dropouts tend to be larger [in] the lower order of the IQ distribution.

One can say that college in and of itself, of course, has become ambiguous, but [with] college education, in and of itself, you see more people equated in IQ, [and it] will certainly make a difference. If you look at the group of persons all, say, of IQ 120, half of whom have not gone beyond high school, the other half of whom have graduated from college or graduate school, you’ll find considerable differences in their occupational status, income, and things like that. So college education does make a difference. You control more IQ.

On the other hand, if you look at the differences between relatively high and low IQ versus all of the same education, you are often surprised that they have had nominally the same amount of education – say, a BA degree or something. A BA degree, for a person with an IQ of 100, really amounts to a very different level of knowledge and competence than for a person with an IQ of 130. They won’t have BA degrees, but other things being equal, personality factors, dependability, and all those things being equal, the person with 130 will probably have a more successful career than the person with 100, even if they have the same education.

There’s no doubt that education has advantages: social, and occupational, economic, and so on — and, I think, personal advantages. I think that a person who is capable of doing the college-level work definitely gets something out of going to college, even if he goes into an occupation that doesn’t require a college education. I know a person who’s never worked at all since getting out of college, but I think his life is very different. He hasn’t had to work, he was born very wealth, but his life has been very different as a result of having graduated from an Ivy League university and done graduate work in another Ivy League university than if he had never, say, finished high school because of what he’s been exposed to. The interests and so forth that he has as a result of his background and education has caused him to lead a very different kind of life than he might have led otherwise. By my standards, [this is] a much richer kind of life; intellectual life and so on, even though he’s never had to work for a living. I’m a believer in education in all of those senses.

Did you have anything else in mind when you wrote that?

MVC: No. Maybe it’s confusing what I was getting at, but what I meant was, if you control for IQ, how much more would the college education help? So you’ve answered my question.

AJ: It does help. I think the value of a college education, in a sense, increases with IQ. Persons with relatively low IQs, who have gone to college, seldom end up in occupations, or have accomplishments, that are commensurate with the majority of people who are college graduates. On the other hand, there are some persons with very high IQs who graduate from college who are very unsuccessful. One of the highest GRE scores that I’ve seen on any student in 30 years at Berkeley was of a young woman whom we had to flunk out of the program — not for intellectual reasons, in particular, but just because of her tremendous undependability as a student.

There are a lot of factors that determine whether a person will succeed in college. Now, I think it’s often forgotten that intellectual interests tend to go along with higher levels of intellectual ability. An example of this is that I knew a couple of professors who were married to each other, and who had adopted two children, and they adopted them when they were infants. They knew something about the natural parents of these children. They were parents who were very average, or maybe even slightly below, and in totally unskilled occupations.

Their main worry was that these children were going to be brought up in a very intellectual and cultured environment, and may develop interests along those lines, but not have the intellect to do anything about those interests, and therefore would be forever frustrated, having intellectual interests without the intellect to pursue them. Now that these children are grown and are young adults, I have talked with these professors and asked them about their children, and asked them whether this worry of theirs ever panned out. It turns out that their children are very average, have very average occupations, and have no intellectual or cultural interests; almost none. They said they just didn’t develop them, and I think that if a person doesn’t have a certain amount of intellectual ability that intellectual things are not found stimulating. They’re boring to them, and so you don’t have to worry about it.

There’s literally a college for everyone today. College is a different level, academic level. I know a college where the average IQ is lower than that of the average IQ of high school graduates. They get the lower half of the distribution of high school graduates — or the lower two-thirds, perhaps. They actually counsel students away who have IQs over 120. They don’t want to admit them to the college, because they think they will be cheated. Many of these students find college very boring, and very irksome. They’re forced to go by their parents’ social pressures, and so on. The instructors at such colleges find that they have to offer something more akin to entertainment than education to keep these kids enrolled and keep them happy. They can come out saying they’re college graduates, but they’re certainly going to be different from a graduate of a highly selective college who has maintained high academic standards and had a student body with strong intellectual interests.

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